Regulating technology is something our state lawmakers continue to grapple with. While we support legislation that would protect the privacy rights of kids who use school technology (more below), we oppose bills that would require age verification for access to social media, completely prevent minors from using social media, or would require parental consent for kids and teenagers to create accounts.
Not only are these bills bad for students’ ability to find community online, but they also unnecessarily undermine the privacy and speech of all users, regardless of age.
Three proposed bills in the 2026 Rhode Island Legislative Session would require age verification for access to social media platforms, but are all slightly different:
- The House version of the Social Media Regulation Act (H 7953) would prohibit use of social media by those under 18 and would require Rhode Island users to verify their age when creating accounts on these platforms.
- The Senate version of the Social Media Regulation Act (S 2968), would prevent minors from creating social media accounts unless a parent or guardian consents to their child creating an account.
- The Rhode Island Children’s Online Safety Act (H 7746) would require users to verify their age and would impose additional access restrictions on users under 18 and users under 13.
Privacy issues
It’s worth emphasizing that should any of these bills pass, every person will be required to prove their age to access social media platforms, not just minors.
Age verification can be done in a number of ways, but often means users must upload a photo of an ID to the social media platform. This presents a number of issues. Requiring users to upload an ID raises questions of data access, retention, and security of this potentially sensitive information. This method also ignores the fact that many people do not have a valid drivers’ license or government-issued ID. That means that a large group of adults will be effectively shut out from accessing online spaces. This is also likely to disproportionately impact low-income people who may not have an ID, and gender nonconforming people who may not have an updated ID.
Other methods of approving accounts in other states have included inherently intrusive facial scans or attestation documents. We could also foresee a scenario where the age-verification process established is easily circumvented (like attestations or merely inputting a birthdate) which would lead to more and more privacy-invading tactics by social media companies.
Plus, if any of these proposed bills would become Rhode Island law, all users would presumably have to share with social media companies what state they are a resident of and/or their location information — another piece of personal data that would just be handed over to companies, without any known safeguards regarding that information.
To summarize, as written, these bills do not yet explain:
- How to prove the age of teenagers who may not have an ID
- Who receives, controls, and retains our personal information (like IDs)
- How location data is used
- How long the data is stored
- How to address any issues of proving child-parent relationships
- How to prove Rhode Island residency
What about parental consent?
The RI Children’s Online Safety Act, and the current Senate version of the Social Media Regulation Act, would allow for a minor to still have access to social media with parental or guardian consent.
This does not solve any of the privacy problems. Requiring parents and guardians to prove they are the child or teenager’s parent or guardian raises the same privacy concerns of how they must prove it, and what data and information is being kept by the company in the process of verifying that relationship.
This approach also ignores a large group of kids. Kids living in foster care or with foster parents would likely be left without a way of accessing social media, and we foresee additional issues for kids who have different last names than their parents or whose guardians are not their biological parents.
Online community and protected speech
Today, political activism and protest organizing are often coordinated online on social media platforms. Limiting youth access to these types of forums by requiring parental consent and instituting invasive age verification practices that create hurdles for all users, will effectively stifle online political engagement and engagement — not to mention infringing upon First Amendment rights.
So, despite these bills intending to reduce or remove youth’s access to social media, they would have broader consequences for all social media users and, even if unintentionally, reduce the number of people who have access to these public forums.
The internet has also become an essential space for young people to connect with peers, gather information, and find social support they may not have access to elsewhere. Social media acts as an extension of a person’s social life, allowing them to deepen social bonds with peers or find a community of shared interests or experiences. Finding those connections is essential for individuals to feel accepted, supported, and understood, regardless of where that community is formed. Restricting access to online communities will have an adverse impact on some LGBTQ+ youth and other kids facing familial issues based on their sexuality or gender identity.
For all of these reasons, we strongly oppose these bills, even while we understand the push to create guardrails around minors’ access to the internet and social media.
Read about bills we do support that would create reasonable guardrails to protect kids’ privacy while they use technology.
A digital privacy bill we do support:
- School Computer Privacy (H 7032, S 2786). This bill would provide specific technological privacy protections for students — including a ban on surreptitious accessing of the computer microphone and camera — so that they do not have to be concerned about inappropriate intrusions of privacy while working on these computers.
